Cedar Trail benchmarks shed light on Intel’s 32nm Atom performance

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Intel’s upcoming 32nm Cedar Trail Atom platform has been an object of curiosity for well over a year, and the recent success and strong performance of AMD’s Brazos platform have ratcheted interest up another few notches. Intel responded to Brazos by issuing an accelerated Atom roadmap in May, but 32nm performance figures have been kept largely under wraps.

If benchmarks leaked by VR-Zone are accurate, we now have an idea what to expect from Intel’s 32nm Cedar Mill SoC. The 32nm chip is Atom’s first die shrink, and while the CPU’s core architecture isn’t changing at this juncture, the move will allow Intel to shrink both the CPU die and, at some point, the total chip package. Wikipedia suggests that the dual-processor Atom N2600 and N2800 will be 66mm sq, which would match the single-core Pineview’s die size. Wikipedia is scarcely gospel, but the prediction makes mathematical sense.

Before we can extrapolate much from the benchmarks, we need to talk about the graph. The 100 percent performance mark is defined by Intel’s Z670, a single-core/Hyper-Threading enabled part at 1.5GHz. The salmon-colored (red) bar is set by the Atom N570, a 1.66GHz dual-core processor with Hyper-Threading enabled. Since both the N2600 and 2800 parts are dual-core as well, it makes more sense to treat the N570 as a baseline for comparative performance.

Doing so indicates that the CPU performance bar will scarcely twitch between 32nm and 45nm Atom flavors running at the same clock speed. The 45nm, 1.67GHz N570 (presumably with HT-enabled) is typically slightly faster than the 1.6GHz N2600, which reportedly lacks that feature. Things are not entirely clear, however — the N2800’s substantial performance boost over the N2600 in CPU-centric tests is higher than clock speed alone can account for — but if the combination of Hyper-Threading and dual-cores made that much of a difference, the gap between the N570 and the N2600 should be larger than it is. It’s possible that the N2800 is also using a feature like Intel’s Burst Mode (think Turbo Boost for Atom) while the N2600 isn’t.

Improved graphics performance is theoretically the big story here, or would be if we hadn’t already heard horror stories about Intel’s problems with DirectX 9 and 10.1 drivers as well as difficulties with technologies like Wireless Display and Smart Connect. Furthermore, doubling the GPU’s power is of questionable value when the CPU’s performance is as anemic as Atom’s is. The original target clock speeds for the N2600 and N2800 were 1.86GHz and 2.13GHz, or ~15 percent faster than the engineering samples referenced here.

All of the available data points towards the same conclusion: Cedar Trail should be able to close the CPU performance gap between itself and Brazos if Intel delivers at its original clock speed targets. GPU performance is another matter. Doubling the Z670’s GPU performance in 3DMark 06 isn’t going to put Intel in AMD’s league, even assuming the CPU giant can iron out its driver issues.

The counter-argument to that is that AMD’s Brazos isn’t a gaming platform either. The one thing 32nm Atom should deliver is improved battery life and better power consumption; two features that arguably matter the most to anyone considering a netbook. Intel’s research in previous years indicated that people bought netbooks as secondary systems, not primary computing platforms, and emphasizing the long battery life and low power consumption that made netbooks popular is also in keeping with Intel’s long-term strategy to create a mobile phone / tablet ecosystem around future iterations of the microprocessor.

The new information on Cedar Trail that’s come to light of late reinforces what we wrote concerning AMD’s mobile roadmap earlier this month: AMD’s 28nm Krishna and Wichita APUs should be well-positioned against future Cedar Trail hardware, particularly if the smaller manufacturer launches the parts towards the beginning of the year. AMD has played its cards very conservatively these last few years, and we don’t expect that to change — if Cedar Trail starts off the year mired in driver quicksand, Sunnyvale will likely wait and polish its 28nm products.

2012 may actually turn out to be a rather boring year, as far as Atom and netbooks/tablets are concerned. x86 tablets are generally seen as tied to Windows (even if Intel has taken steps to change that) and Windows 8 isn’t expected until the tail end of 2012/beginning of 2013. Intel’s target of a 5.5W TDP for Cedar Trail is 40 percent below its 45nm dual-core netbook parts, but likely still too high for cell phone manufacturers or iPad-competitive tablets, even once we factor in the appearance of a lower-power part. With ARM architectures making their own shift to 28nm next year as well, Intel will likely have to wait for 2013 and the appearance of its 22nm Silvermont chip to make a play for those spaces.

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